In April 1988, a team of 40 MIT students, faculty, and alumni set a world record for human-powered flight. Piloted by Greek cycling champion Kanellos Kanellopoulos, Daedalus 88 flew 74 miles from Crete to Santorini in a re-creation of the mythological flight of the craft’s namesake. Under the leadership of graduate student John Langford, the project began three years earlier as a partnership between MIT and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Following a successful feasibility study, the prototype aircraft Michelob Light Eagle was built and tested at Lincoln Laboratory’s Flight Test Facility and the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. Pilots Lois McCallin and Glenn Tremml set four world records for human-powered flight in January 1987. Support from United Technologies and dozens of other corporations inspired the construction of the real aircraft—Daedalus 87 and Daedalus 88— as well as the trip to Greece the following year that would shatter those earlier records. The project’s success made MIT front-page news around the globe. This major cultural endeavor not only involved active collaboration between two nations, but also spurred the formation of a new company, engineering research, and major curriculum reform in aerospace engineering at MIT and beyond.